


Showers

by paroxferox



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Flashbacks, Gen, Panic Attacks, Steve Has Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-29
Updated: 2013-12-29
Packaged: 2018-01-06 15:35:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1108538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paroxferox/pseuds/paroxferox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adjusting to the future is hard. He never realized that showers were going to be a part of that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Showers

Before he put his plane in the ocean and woke up in the future, Steve Rogers took cold showers.

The first shower he takes in New York is warm, thanks to some nameless attendant in SHIELD’s recovery facility. She shows him how to adjust the temperature, giving him an explanation that seems unnecessarily complex (there’s hot and there’s cold, how hard can it be?), and then leaves. Steve doesn’t bother to protest that time; he’s already confused enough as it is. He soaps down in the tepid water as quickly as he can and gets out just as quickly. It feels unfamiliar, like everything in the building, and he hates it.

The next day, when he tries the faucet without supervision, the water comes out hot enough to scald and sends him scrambling out of the shower to inspect himself for burns before adjusting the temperature. Even with the brief instruction of the day before, it takes him a while to turn the heat down. When the water’s the same cold he remembers from his Army days, he steps in.

He expects it to be refreshing. It’s not.

For a moment, he thinks that the way the water knocks the breath out of him is his normal reaction to sudden cold. Invigorating, they always used to say. But when the gasp doesn’t stop, when it turns into a constricting chest and his head swims, he realizes that something’s gone wrong. He’s not in the shower anymore, he’s back in the cockpit and he’s said his good-byes to Peggy and put himself  _through_  the ice, and there’s icewater surging into the plane, squeezing the air from the cockpit, frigid salt spray prickling his skin as the ocean rushes to envelop him –

He stumbles out of the shower so fast he slips on the tile, feet going out from under him and depositing him with a crash onto the floor.  He comes to with one hand clutching what seems to be half the shower curtain. The other is clasped over his pounding heart like he’s trying to keep it in his chest. His breathing comes in short sobs, and for a moment he literally feels like he’s dying all over again, this time not in the ocean with dignity but naked on the floor of an unfamiliar bathroom, surrounded by strangers.

It takes probably a quarter of an hour to get his breathing under control. He’s in a bathroom, in New York, seventy years later than he should be. He’s not back there in the plane, he’s somewhere else. Somewhere impossible. He’s in an impossibly-nice bathroom, with a separate shower and tub, and he just fell out of the shower. “Get it together, Rogers,” he murmurs. “Just water.”

Still, he won’t be taking cold showers anymore. That much is obvious.

When he finally stands up, the water’s still running. He turns it as hot as he can stand, and when he steps into the spray, he tries not to think at all.

 


End file.
